Watchet web cam

[sarabande]

Would it be worth the town, the fishermen and the sailors getting together, forming a CIC and applying for some Heritage Lottery funding ? Direct and calculable benefits from having a mudfree harbour.

Or buy a sodding great Flugt pump and point the outlet at the mud as the tide goes down. That's what we did in Dubai about 40 years ago. The amount of mud in theharbour is negligible compared with the amount sitting on the sea shore from the Servern Bridge downwards. Agitation, agitation, agitation !

 

[bitbaltic]

It never did so before. It just left the trench you mentioned. But in any case, if the cill is at a level to provide floating depth for the bots then there is that same level of water left in the marina to deposit its silt. If left alone, the bed of the marina would rise to the point where it was level with the top of the cill.

Indeed so.

So presumably the stream was not agitating the water sufficiently at high tide to prevent settling, and was doing its erosive work below high water when flowing fast out of the gate and scouring a trench.

If that’s the case then there’s no coming for a deep marina as it’s currently without first digging the whole thing out and then installing some uneconomic agitator System.

An alternative would be:

Coffee dam it and dig it out
Divert the stream into it
Install a lock, so silt-free water only ever flows out of it and it is a freshwater marina, like Cardiff Bay

The drawbacks are obvious; that would be horrendously expensive and if the stream has a limited flow the lock could only be used once a day or maybe once a week.....

It would be easy enough to calculate the recharge volume from the stream and therefore the potential frequency of lock use, which might vary a lot seasonally.

As it is it is probably as well to get rid of the cill and give up on the whole idea of a non-drying marina. That’s where it has been for years anyway.

 

[PCUK]

I believe that once the harbour and marina have been mechanically dug out, the water injection dredger will be able to keep ahead of the mud.

 

[ribdriver]

And I believe that is the plan.... dig it : empty it completely, then agitate it regularly. The marina are building a small water injection dredger much like the Cardiff machine. BUT they need to empty the entire marina and the harbour first.... and that’s the really expensive and not insignificant bit.
The outer harbour needs doing also as it has been proven that when it is full of silt as it is now, any new incoming silt goes into the marina instead.

 

[PCUK]

Any idea of the cost of a full dredge?

 

[ribdriver]

Well it's in the hundred's of thousands I believe.
Depends on how it was physically done. There was a lot of recent talk about putting excavators etc in there. Then dumping at the low water mark. But lots of considerations such as
Dumping grounds and the MMO licencing
What to do with the boats in the meantime.

 

[vodzurk]

Apologies for being the random idiot wandering into a otherwise sensible conversation again... it's been a horrible long day at work, and am half brain dead...

If cill was temporarily removed... couldn't somebody just blast sections of it out with a powerwasher at LW? Or use a powerwasher to agitate on the ebb?

 

[PCUK]

I suppose many boats could be lifted onto the hard and any others moved on a temporary basis to other marinas.